Experience with Grain Surgery 2

[david enzel]

I am shopping for software to reduce grain. I have a Mac running OS X. I've tried Fred

Miranda's plug in and Grain Surgery 2. Grain Surgery 2 seems to do a much nicer job

but costs a lot more. Does anyone have experience with Grain Surgery 2? Anything

else I should try?

 

I also would welcome feedback on Genuine Fractals.

[jorge]

David,

 

I have tried the Genuine Fractals demo and Fred Miranda's Stair Interpolation. I've found Stair Interpolation does at least a good work as Genuine Fractals upsizing images and at a fraction of the price. Stair Interpolation has been replaced by Stair Interpolation Pro which I haven't tried.

[phil_v.]

Grain Surgery 2 (which I use on a PC) and Neat Image Pro have been the two leaders in this field for the past couple of years. Noise Ninja, a relative newcommer, has been receiving good reviews.

 

Never used Genuine Fractals.

[louis_greene]

There was some mention of Neat image on the luminous landscape web site and a link to a site that did some comparisons. Grain surgery, neat image, and noise ninja were all in close contention with each other. If I remember correct, Noise Ninji was a smidge better. I used a trial version of Neat Image and was impressed (at reducing film grain from scanned slides) Let us know what you end up with and how you like it.

[phil_v.]

To wind-up my prior post, GS2 is a PS plug-in and is compatible with both PC and Mac. I use GS2 on a PC and find it works very well for me. Fwiw, my use of GS2 is to 'deal with' film grain and not digicam noise, so I can't comment on it's capabilities for the latter.

 

Compared to the others GS2 is rather expensive, but as a Mac user you don't have much choice... To the best of my knowledge the other grain/noise apps mentioned are stand-alone PC-only apps (not PS plug-ins) and they don't run 'natively' on a Mac!

[john_gill]

Neat Image is available as a plug-in.